fic: With Rain In My Shoes
Title: With Rain In My Shoes.
Rating: R for dark themes
Pairings or Characters: Peter/Claire, Peter/OCs, briefly Nathan, Noah, Elle, Angela and Adam
Warnings: set post S2, incest, ANGST, suicide, character death, swearing, insanity?
Prompt: 30. Kentucky Rain, Elvis Presley (No specific character/pairing)
Disclaimer: I don't own anything and I certainly don't own this.
Summary: It's as if they're in different orbits, because wherever Peter is, Claire is not.
Notes: I swear, I'm going to write something that doesn't kick Peter around any day now. But not today. Written for heroes_fest.
Seven lonely days/And a dozen towns ago/I reached out one night and you were gone
Kentucky Rain - Elvis Presley
I'm leaving, the note says, in her loopy handwriting. I can't do this anymore, I feel dirty and wrong, and how can you be a hero with this thing hanging over your head? We're better off apart, Peter, you can save the world like you need to and I can try to be a teenager again.
Please don't try to find me. Claire.
He sits on the edge of the motel bed, the lights of passing cars occasionally flooding the tiny room, and reads the words over and over. He knew that Claire had had reservations about... whatever this is (was) but the way she'd moaned his name night after night, crashed into him with unrestrained screams - he'd thought that would be enough to keep her.
He was wrong, it seems.
*
“Have you heard from Claire?” He's not trying to find her, he's just curious. Really.
Nathan barely lowers his newspaper. “No, she's pretty much cut ties with the entire Petrelli clan. Clever girl.”
“So you... have no idea at all where she is?” He tries not to sound too desperate, but it's been a week, and he's discovered that he can't sleep without her small body next to his. He found an old dress of hers a couple of days ago; a silky gold affair crumpled up at the end of his bed, and it smells of her perfume and sweat. It's only when he's holding it that he can drift off into an uneasy sleep.
“Why don't you call her father?” Nathan suggests.
In that moment, it sounds like the best idea ever.
*
“Peter.” Noah greets him stiffly when he calls.
Something wells up in Peter's chest, clawing madly to be let out. He holds the phone tight to his ear. “Hi, hey,” he answers breathlessly. “I was just, um, do you know where Claire is? She- there's something I need to talk to her about, it- it's kind of important.”
“Do you really think,” Noah replies coolly, “that I'm going to tell you?” His voice drops to a whisper, but Peter can hear every word. “She told you to leave her alone, and she told me everything. If you could die, I would kill you. You've abused my little girl, Peter; her trust, her innocence, your responsibility as her uncle. Leave her alone.”
The line goes dead, and Peter sits motionless, with only the dial tone for company.
*
He aches for her touch, and in the dead of night she gives it to him. Her hands glide across his chest, dig roughly into his shoulders and scratch, scratch, scratch all the way down to his hips. The wounds don't heal, and she leaves bloody hand prints on his chest as she leans in to kiss him, biting down hard on his tongue when he explores her mouth.
“I can hurt you, Peter,” she growls, rocking her hips against his. “Beg me to hurt you.”
“Hurt me, Claire, please,” he says, reaching up to take hold of her.
When he wakes, there's blood smeared across his chest and sheets, and a metallic after taste in his mouth but no marks at all.
*
A girlfriend is what he needs. A nice, tall, dark-haired, large-breasted older woman to screw his brains out.
There are a lot of those in New York.
The woman he finds is a friend of his mother's, he's known her since he was five years old, called her 'auntie' for twenty-two years. He fucks her up against the dresser in the pantry.
Well, why the hell not? It's hardly the worst thing he's ever done.
When he's finished - a sweaty shaking mess, and yet not in any way satisfied - she reaches for her cigarettes. “Well, well, well,” she says, lighting up. “I always did think there was more to you than puppy dog eyes and floppy hair. You could give your brother a run for his money.”
She strokes her fingers along his jaw, sharp acrylic nails catching against the two day stubble there. He shoves her hand away. “Don't fucking touch me,” he hisses, bending down to retrieve his pants.
She shrugs. “Smoke?” she asks, holding the packet out to him.
“Those things'll kill you,” he says, taking one. Her laugh sounds like nails on a blackboard.
He takes a long drag, holding the smoke in his lungs until his eyes water. She laughs again, and it feels like it's gnawing at the back of his head. He stubs the cigarette out on his arm, holding it there until her eyes grow wide, savouring the pain.
There's something like fear in her expression when he asks for the lighter, her gaze glued to his smooth unblemished skin. He laughs at her, snatching the gold case from her hand.
*
He begins his experiments with pain and death six months to the day that she leaves. At first he flicks the lighter on, holds his hand above it long after the smell of burning flesh fills his nostrils, until he can't feel the pain any more.
He tries cutting his wrists, but the pain is so fleeting, and he always ends up having to wash up afterwards.
He tries hanging, but that involves prep work, and it's awkward getting down when he comes round. And anyway, he loses consciousness far too quickly.
Drowning: not painful, just kind of disconcerting.
Throwing himself off tall buildings: often mistaken for suicide, irritating to find deserted places to do it, pain too fleeting (again).
Overdose: hell to find enough pills to knock him out, gross to clean up the vomit, not painful at all.
He resorts to the internet for other ideas, and finds one he hadn't thought of: electrocution.
*
“Elle.” He surprises her outside of the facility in the middle of the day, under the cover of his invisibility. She jumps, blue balls of flaring up in her palms. “Wanna play?”
He takes them to a field. She squirms the whole time that he flies with her, not a thing like Claire, who might have been a bird she was so comfortable flying in his arms.
“Try your worst,” he says, setting her down.
“I don't understand,” she replies, sparks playing along her fingers nevertheless.
“You don't need to.” He steps back and holds his arms at his side. “C'mon, Elle, you said I'd like it.”
She shrugs a shoulder, stretching her arms out. “Okay.” And sends volts and volts of electricity square into his chest. He stumbles, throwing his head back as the electricity feels like it's rattling around his body, licking up and down his bones, exploding behind his eyelids.
“More,” he growls, and she hits him so hard that he blacks out for a second. When he comes around, she's looking down at him curiously, and for a second he thinks... “Claire?”
Elle's laugh sounds like breaking glass.
*
“Why don't we have sex?” Elle asks him once, smiling brightly on the roof of the Deveaux building. “I don't have to always hurt you, Peter, I can make you feel good too.”
“Does that feel good?”
Claire shivers beneath him as he sucks on her neck, as the water rushes to the shore and back out again, as the sun beats down the empty beach. This is the place that she used to come with West, her replacement-Peter, and they're here because there shouldn't be any place that she associates with that boy over him.
Peter has to leave his mark on her somehow.
He stretches over and begins exploring the shell of her ear; kissing, licking, biting, and she wreathes under him again.
“Peter,” she whispers. “Can we really do this?”
He moves around to her mouth, kisses her softly but insistently, until all her thoughts revolve around his lips and his hands.
“We can do anything,” he says, hugging her body to his. “Anything at all.”
Elle wilts under his hard stare. He holds his arm out.
“Just do it, Elle.”
*
They want him to save the world. Again.
Peter watches holding facility after holding facility fall, windows smashed, walls vaporised, guards with ripped out throats, and the cockroaches held within burst out on to the surface, their broken bloody trails easy to follow.
“Help,” Hiro says, because they wanted the same things an age ago. To save the world.
Peter almost says no.
*
His mother's friend - Sue - has a cigarette every time after they have sex, takes a couple of puffs, stubs it out and starts over again.
She has a new lighter, silver with her husband's initials on it.
“Do you love him?” Peter asks, because there are so many things that he doesn't understand, and he has no concept of why a person would commit adultery.
“I suppose.” The flame burns a sickly yellow for her third cigarette, and Peter reaches out, closing his fist around it, watching her closely.
“Why do you do this then?” he says. He wants her to explain it to him.
“You're young, you're pretty, you're here.” She ignores his smouldering skin, just like she ignores her husband's secret phone calls and badly concealed bank statements. “He's old and fat, and often away on business.”
“I'd never cheat on someone I loved.” It's not cheating, he tells himself. It's not, it's not, it's not.
She giggles, in a way she probably thinks is attractive. It isn't. “Oh Peter, so young. When you grow up, you'll learn.”
Her breasts are like two hard balls attached to her chest. He doesn't want to touch them. “I'm never going to grow up. I'm Peter Pan.”
She leans in, bringing them closer. He can't tear his gaze away. “Does that make me Wendy?”
He smirks. “No.”
If he cared, he'd feel guilty about the hurt expression colouring her features. She pulls the sheet up around her chest, releasing him from her hold. “Don't forget to turn the hallway light off when you leave.”
*
And then the first round of dying begins. Elle is killed by a stray bullet when she's out on a job (where's he going to find a charge big enough now?), Sue 'accidentally' takes too many sleeping pills (who's he going to forget himself with now?) and his mom is diagnosed with bone cancer (shouldn't he be more upset than this?).
He looks after her in her final days; he was a hospice nurse once, it's expected of him. He feeds her and washes her and manages her medication, and everyday he feels a little less than he did the day before.
“Beloved.” Her voice is barely a rasp now, and he turns to her as he changes her drip. "Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.”
“What?” He lays the drip down on the bed, and leans over her. “What did you say?”
“False prophets, Peter,” she whispers, eyes darting to the drip. “More morphine.”
She slips away peacefully that night. In her will, she leaves her house, her books, her paintings to Nathan and her whole fortune to Peter. You'll need it, the lawyer reads back to them.
Nathan pretends he isn't jealous, and doesn't point out that the doctors had said that Angela still had a good few weeks left.
*
When Nathan gets sick, he's seventy-five; which makes Peter sixty-five, he thinks. He still doesn't look a day over twenty-six.
It's a problem with his nervous system, they say, but experts are left scratching their heads over what to do, and Nathan refuses to stay in hospital.
“I'm not dying in this miserable fucking place,” he says, gritting his teeth as he pulls the IV out.
“You don't have to die at all,” Peter replies, standing like a loose end in the doorway. “My blood...”
Nathan looks up sharply. “Because you're so happy, Pete? What you've got in your veins is a curse and I don't want it. I've had a good run, and that's enough for me.”
The illness works its dark magic quickly, leaving Nathan bedridden, and a carer is brought in to look after him while Peter goes out and gets drunk.
He leaves a slurred message on the answering machine of the number that he thinks is the Bennets. Nathan's dying. Come see him. He might have said something else, cried or begged or yelled, but by morning he's blocked it all out.
*
It's his birthday and there's snow falling all around him as he stumbles out of one bar and into another. To celebrate turning sixty-six (?) he wastes a good chunk of his inheritance on alcohol of every kind and drinks it alone because anyone he could have once called a friend is probably wrapping Christmas presents for their grandkids right now.
He's staying at the mansion over the holidays, to spend a final Christmas with Nathan, and where once she used to be his ally against the dysfunction, now all Heidi has left for him is fear, watching a man trapped in time die agonisingly slowly.
The place is silent at four o'clock on the morning of Christmas Eve when he arrives home, the enormous tree glittering in the light of the street lamps. He falls over his great-niece and nephews toys, cursing and kicking them out of the way, and there's a creak from above - just a tiny noise, but he's had the misfortune to pick up enhanced hearing from one of his many encounters with Sylar.
And there she is at the top of the stairs, blonde hair like a halo around her head.
“Claire,” he croaks, leaning against the wall.
She doesn't look at him as she comes down, keeps her gaze on the ground, and tries to pass him. “I just came to say goodbye,” she whispers, but he grabs at her, clinging to her shoulders.
“Claire,” he says roughly, shaking hands closing around her face. “You're here, it's really you.”
She shies away from his touch. “I'm not here for you, it's been over thirty years, Peter. Move on.”
She attempts to get to the front door, but he drops to his knees, grabbing hold of her legs. “Please, Claire. Don't leave me here alone.”
Her lip curls. “Oh God, get away from me, Peter.”
And then she's gone, and he's curled up on the floor, waiting. Waiting for something else to happen.
When he wakes up, Heidi looks down at him with the same expression as Claire wore the night before, pity and disgust, and tells him that Nathan died in the night.
*
Move on, Claire said. It's been over thirty years. So he tries - everyone's gone now anyway, it's the perfect time to start over. Monty and Simon's kids have kids of their own now, and Peter's just a spectre of some other time in history of the Petrelli family.
He tries several things; being a self-styled superhero only to discover that the real world is nothing like the world within the colourful pages of a comic; going back to nursing, only to realise that he no longer cares about the plight of the dying, now he's just jealous and irritated by their families' tears; being a husband and father, only to see them as second best to everything he's ever had.
His wife is soft and pretty, easy to lie to and manipulate - her mind is easy to twist and change and rebuild to his liking, but he can never make her who he wants her to be. His kids are difficult and loud, saddled with powers that manifest when they're toddlers - the ability to control fire and the ability to fly, and he hates clearing up their messes, wiping teachers minds when the youngest has a tantrum and hovers a couple of inches off the ground, planting false memories when the oldest accidentally sets fire to her classroom and kills three of her friends.
He hates the responsibility and the commitment of... this, and then. And then their mom dies, in a car accident or something, and now he can't leave them, because what the hell will happen to them in a children's home? Probably bring about the next fucking apocalypse. Which he'd have to deal with.
“Dad?” his daughter says when she's eight, as her brother runs riot somewhere else in the house.
“What did you do?”
She points out of the window, where smoke pours from the windows of the neighbour's house.
He sighs. “We're moving.”
*
He did an okay job, he thinks, considering. They didn't turn into psychopaths or mass murders or anything, and when they're twenty-eight and thirty, he leaves them to deal with their dramas on their own.
That was years ago, maybe fifty or more and he decides that he's not going to make that mistake again; instead choosing to spend his time in brothels where no one knows his name or that he was important once upon a time.
That works out for him for a while - a good while, until the world needs saving again.
Reports come in, slowly in the first few months, the last story before kittens are rescued from trees by smiling firefighters - doctors talking about the rise and patterns of the disease. Nothing to worry about, it's not like it's going to happen to you, they all think. And anyway, it's only affecting the old, right? The theory of evolution in action.
Yeah, until kids and babies begin contracting it, and everyone in one tiny town in Kansas fall ill.
It's a central nervous system condition, the doctors say. They think it might be connected to fish, or something in the water, or radiation from cell phones, or or or-
They don't know, is the truth, but he does. He almost smiles at the audacity of it, Adam's back and he's not even trying any more. The same scheme as over a hundred years ago? It's unimaginative work.
*
Peter's blood isn't special, it turns out. As soon as it leaves his body, it's just regular old O negative, which was great when he wanted to save all those car crash victims with his awesome compatible blood, but that's not going to cut it any more.
Nathan might have been patient zero, he realises, with his nervous system problem that couldn't be explained. Something itches at the edge of his mind, poking insistently at the soft tissue - he couldn't save his brother, and all he's done with his life so far is cover up deaths and abuse people.
He needs to find Claire.
*
He needed to find Claire. After Nathan's death and resurrection, he'd been consumed with a burning desire to see her, and he'd flown to California, found her in a half empty house and kissed her before she could stop him.
She didn't even try to.
Love was an emotion that at twenty-eight Peter thought he was well-versed in; he'd been in and out of it his whole life, falling for a smile or joke or the way a girl's hair swished behind her when she walked away from him. Legs, eyes, hands, kissing, sex - he loved it all, found all girls to be completely mesmerising in one way or another.
But that was the thing: 'girls' plural. No one person could ever hold his attention, or put up with the intensity of his worship for long. He was too... obsessive, as a college girlfriend once explained kindly, stroking his hair and petting him like a dog.
Claire could be the object of his obsession, he'd been certain of that. She lapped the attention up, adored driving him wild with desire until he was thisclose to breaking apart, then piecing him back together, almost the same but with one or two bits missing. Oh well, who would notice?
She literally and figuratively changed him.
They made plans; he constructed stories about what they'd do when they were free from the stranglehold of blood and family. They'd travel, get married, change their names, have children, live their lives over and over, a different name with every turn of the century but the same Peter and Claire underneath.
He swore he'd never change from the man she'd created, that his personality was a permanent fixture, would weather every storm the world had to offer. He'd been so young.
She made him this way, and then she abandoned him, still only half-formed, to his fate. It wasn't fair, you can't slack off when you create a person anew, can't leave a child in the world alone.
He has to find her, because her work isn't finished yet.
*
He rediscovers her through books and newspapers and pictures; children miraculously going into remission, and men pulled from burning buildings.
She did travel, it seems, judging by the path she leaves behind her. A painting hangs in the Louvre of a girl with long long blonde hair, reaching all the way to the backs of her knees, her arms outstretched as she stands on the edge of a precipice. She could be any girl, he knows, might be a figment of the artist's imagination, but she isn't. She's Claire because his heart sings when he stands before it, she's Claire because who else could inspire such a passionate rendering?
In Italy, there's a novel that's already a classic, written eighty years previous, about a girl on the edges of life, a melancholy angel who you'll only ever see out of the corner of your eye, with a sad smile and delicate hands.
In England there's an old man that'll tell you the most fantastic tales, of travelling the world with a girl no older than sixteen, who rewrote everything he ever thought he knew about life at age forty-five.
In the outback of Australia, there's a town whose children grow up believing in the myth of vampires, ghosts and witches because of an ageless woman seen every few decades, who breaks her bones and cuts her wrists but always walks away unscathed.
But it's as if they're in different orbits, because wherever Peter is, Claire is not.
He follows her around the world twice and back to America, as governments fall and are replaced, and the earth goes round the sun thirty thousand times. Another hundred years pass and the trail is cold, while people get sicker and sicker, and no matter how many cures are discovered, the virus mutates to claim millions of new victims every year.
It's almost a companion now, the only thing in life that he can rely on to change and grow with him, to push him on in his seemingly unending quest.
It occurs to him more than once that maybe he's the virus; the thing that just doesn't know when to give up. He's a virus created just for Claire. Fitting, since she infected him first.
*
At some point - time has lost all meaning to him now - he finds himself in Texas, a crumpled photograph of Claire beneath his fingers, in a bar, showing it to the bartender.
“How old is this?” the guy says, setting Peter's glass down and carefully handled the washed-out picture. “It must ancient.”
Peter smirks, taking a long drink of the synthetic alcohol - hops and grapes don't grow so well any more. “Recognise her?”
The bartender frowns, thinks how much has this guy already had to drink? But he looks back down anyway, and his eyebrows slowly climb. “You know, she does kind of look like old Tom's grandkid.” He gestures over to a tiny old man hunched over in chair nursing a drink. “Maybe ask him?”
That was not the answer Peter expected. He takes the photograph back wordlessly, and walks over to Tom carefully, as if reality might shift away from him if he makes any sudden movements.
“Tom?”
The man squints up at him. “Yes?” he croaks.
“Do you- do you recognise this girl?” His fingers tremble as he holds the picture out. Tom squints harder, pulling a pair of glasses from where they hang in the collar of his shirt and slipping them on. He takes the photograph from Peter.
“Young man, where did you get this?”
Peter smiles at the obvious mistake in the statement. “Old family album, Sir.”
“Son,” Tom says, wrinkling his nose in a oddly familiar way, “this is my great-grandmother. Exactly what album did you get it from?”
*
His great-great-great-nephew. That's just weird. (And means that... Claire did move on from him.) Tom potters around his tiny house, pulling out stacks of albums and setting them down in front of Peter as he sits on a musty old couch.
“My great-grandfather Robert met her right here in Midland,” Tom says. “He was a builder and she blew through town and stole his heart. They're had two children: Sandra and Nathan, and then she left, abandoned her babies, and took his heart with her.”
Peter can sympathise with Robert, poring over the faded shots of Claire and her children, seeing something he relates to in her eyes - wanderlust, bitterness, loneliness, age.
“Can you do anything?” Peter asks tentatively.
Tom cocks his head. “You're being a little vague there.”
“Anything... that others can't.”
“I cook a mean chicken stew.” Tom smiles, showing all his shiny white dentures. “But maybe you mean this?” He holds his hand out, palm up, and produces a small flame. Peter copies him, unable to stop himself from making his flame larger and brighter.
“You get that from your great-great-grandmother,” he tells Tom.
“And how would you know that?”
He shrugs, retrieving his one picture and standing. “I should go, thanks for talking to me, Tom.”
The old younger man nods and follows him to the door. “I hope you find her.”
Peter frowns, and Tom smiles wider, crossing his arms. “I've always thought there was something strange about this family - Peter, is it?”
“You have no idea.”
*
Wars come and go, the world destroys and rebuilds itself under his feet and the pages of history never remember Peter Petrelli, an entirely unremarkable man.
Claire stays with him in his dreams, kisses him, whispers to him on cold nights, and his body responds even when his mind doesn't want to. He hates her, hates himself, hates the world.
The virus moves faster every year, felling families, politicians, schoolteachers, doctors; the high and the low - and Peter hasn't done a thing to stop it. Hasn't done a thing, and doesn't care to. He's not a hero, he's barely even a man - no name, no family, no social security number. If a person is a sum of their parts, then what does that make him?
There's a nuclear war once, that burns the ground and wipes out half of the population, destroys the new government and most technology. It's like going back to the beginning, to a time that even Peter doesn't know. No phones, television, computers, electric ovens, central heating; food difficult to come by, and mostly poisoned anyway - civilisation just gone with the push of a button.
He watches this from above, sometimes literally, as the rain starts but never stops, and people call out for help.
He says no.
*
And then it all changes so fast.
Nothing is Peter's life has been fast for a good long time now; he sees the patterns of mankind laid out before him, mistakes made over and over, and it's never hard to call the next great conflict, but this knocks him off his feet.
There are whispers these days, of gods among men, who heal and judge and save the worthy ones from the radiation sickness. It stirs something in Peter, makes him follow the pilgrimage to Kentucky, where camps have been erected and villages are being built - it's the most civilisation he's seen in years, everyone else is still scraping around in the dirt.
Gods, they say. Gods have bestowed this upon us.
*
The nights are cold enough to freeze his fingertips - they turn blue and black and pink in endless cycles, as rain beats down on his head and it's at these times that he hears the whispers from within the tents, as he prowls invisibly.
We must be inside by dark, or we will be punished. The night is for them, not us.
And it's now, right now, a moment that stands above the sludge of time, that he finds her.
She's walking across the sandy ground, letting her hands run through the covered fires of the worshippers. His brain stops, his heart pumps the first new blood for centuries around his body, time and space folds, and he's on her, hand over her mouth, taking them up up up into the sky.
*
“Peter,” she breathes, when they're seventy feet high, and her arms are draped around his shoulders. “You came.”
“I came?” he snarls, digging his fingers hard into her waist. “You left!”
“Mm,” is all she gives him, as the rain quickly soaks both of them through, glancing down and giggling. “The fires look fairy lights from up here.”
“Claire!” he yells, hugging her hard enough to crush her ribs. “Fucking look at me!”
She blinks up at his reddening face. “Don't yell, I'm right here,” she replies in a singsong voice, slipping her fingers underneath his waistband. “I guess you missed me, then?”
His arms tighten and spasm, and he wants to hit her but he drops her instead. She falls like a dead weight, doesn't scream or wave her arms or anything, just falls and impacts hard with the ground below. Peter swoops down and grabs her arm before she's managed to push it back into its socket, pulling her back up into the sky.
“What's going on, Claire?” he shouts as her arm twists unnaturally. She gives it smack with her hand - pop! - and she climbs up his body, her feet resting on top of his. “Tell me what's going on,” he repeats. “I don't understand.”
“Oh, poor little Peter,” she whispers, pressing her lips against his. He opens his mouth - to tell her to get off him, to tell her that he hates her and wishes she had died that night at homecoming - and finds himself kissing her, gripping her hair in his fists and moaning pathetically against her, repeating 'you left me, you left me' over and over.
He can't hold on to the righteous anger that he's been cultivating for hundreds of years - it melts straight out of him, leaving him the same shaking mess that he was when he was twenty-eight.
“I tried to find you, Claire,” he says, as she wipes at his wet cheeks. “I looked everywhere, I found your trail, but I could never find you.”
“I didn't want you to find me,” she replies, all smiles, eyes sparkling in a way that makes him feel just slightly off-kilter. “But I'll tell you a secret...” She pulls herself higher in his grip, leaning close to his ear. “I was pregnant when I left.”
The silence of the night screams all around him, and he stares at her grinning face. “Claire-”
“I had an abortion, of course, daddy arranged it. Boy, was that difficult, my body is like a fortress.”
“Claire...” His voice cracks, and he feels new tears roll down his cheeks.
“Oh baby, don't cry, that's all done and dusted now.” She kisses his cheeks, her fingertips fluttering along his jaw.
“I- I-” he stammers, taking long gasping breaths. “I needed you to- the virus, your blood could have cured it and I think- Nathan was the first to get it and and I didn't help him and he died and everyone died, and everyone's dead and I'm alone- I've been alone for so long-”
She shushes him with a finger to his lips. “You're not alone any more, Peter. Claire will look after you, and everything's going to be perfect now. And anyway, those people deserved to die.”
“What?” He wraps his hand around hers and holds it to his chest.
She shrugs. “Those people, they got the virus because they deserved to die; even Nathan, he wasn't y'know, the best guy ever, now was he? Maybe if he'd made more of an effort - who knows.”
“Claire.” He stares at her in shock. “Adam let that virus out.”
“I know, it was his judgement.”
Something drops in the pit of his stomach, something that should have long ago connected connects. False prophets.
“Adam isn't God, Claire, he can't choose who lives and who dies.”
“Why not?” She traces lines along his arms, staring, unfocused, into the distance. “He's seen everything, he understands human nature, knows man better than man knows himself. He's a god to all these people, and so am I.” She gives a sharp little nod, and wrinkles her nose, smiling up at him in a way that would normally be adorable.
“You aren't a god, Claire. You're supposed help people, not judge them.”
“I help. I raised a baby from the dead today, her mother gave me all her food for a week in thanks. I have to power to resurrect, I control life and death - in their eyes I am a god.”
“What happened to you?” he whispers, but she doesn't catch it, just looks at him with those scary shining eyes and continues.
“But, of course, we've just been waiting for the saviour, and now you're here. There's nothing you can't do - you're God now.” They've floated higher and higher as they've been speaking, and now she glances down again, spotting the one building for miles. “Oh, look, there's Adam,” she says, pointing to the roof. “Let's go tell him.”
“Yes,” he growls. “Let's.”
*
They touch down on the smooth surface of the building - it was probably rough concrete once, but hundreds of years of weather as smoothed it down to a marble-like shine.
Adam waits for them to cross over to him, his hands in his pockets and a smile on his face. The wind and the rain whistles viciously between them, making the ends of his coat billow up, and Claire's hair blow all over her face.
“The wanderer returns,” Adam exclaims. “I'm so glad, Claire has been a terrible bore going on and on about 'her hero' for centuries now. You don't know what it's like spending eternity with a teenager.” He rolls his eyes pointedly at Claire as she shrieks childishly and tries to untangle her hair.
Peter takes one, two, three steps and then he's nose to nose with Adam. “You,” he says, feeling his fists grow hot. “You are a mass fucking murderer.”
Adam smirks. “I suppose I am.”
“But here's the thing-” The wind howls louder, blotting out Claire's oblivious chatter and spinning around Peter and Adam like the eye of a tornado. “I can do anything. I can twist your mind, wipe your memories, remove your head from your shoulders - and then we'll see just how far you can regenerate.” He places a hand on Adam's chest, whispers, “I'm here now, Adam,” and pushes him off the edge of the building.
Adam laughs as he falls.
“Claire.” He steps back over to her, raindrops like needles on his skin, pulling her hair away from her face and holding her still. “I'm going to fix you, okay?”
She shrugs, smiles, pushes herself on to her toes and kisses his forehead. “Whatever you say, Peter.”
Rating: R for dark themes
Pairings or Characters: Peter/Claire, Peter/OCs, briefly Nathan, Noah, Elle, Angela and Adam
Warnings: set post S2, incest, ANGST, suicide, character death, swearing, insanity?
Prompt: 30. Kentucky Rain, Elvis Presley (No specific character/pairing)
Disclaimer: I don't own anything and I certainly don't own this.
Summary: It's as if they're in different orbits, because wherever Peter is, Claire is not.
Notes: I swear, I'm going to write something that doesn't kick Peter around any day now. But not today. Written for heroes_fest.
Seven lonely days/And a dozen towns ago/I reached out one night and you were gone
Kentucky Rain - Elvis Presley
I'm leaving, the note says, in her loopy handwriting. I can't do this anymore, I feel dirty and wrong, and how can you be a hero with this thing hanging over your head? We're better off apart, Peter, you can save the world like you need to and I can try to be a teenager again.
Please don't try to find me. Claire.
He sits on the edge of the motel bed, the lights of passing cars occasionally flooding the tiny room, and reads the words over and over. He knew that Claire had had reservations about... whatever this is (was) but the way she'd moaned his name night after night, crashed into him with unrestrained screams - he'd thought that would be enough to keep her.
He was wrong, it seems.
*
“Have you heard from Claire?” He's not trying to find her, he's just curious. Really.
Nathan barely lowers his newspaper. “No, she's pretty much cut ties with the entire Petrelli clan. Clever girl.”
“So you... have no idea at all where she is?” He tries not to sound too desperate, but it's been a week, and he's discovered that he can't sleep without her small body next to his. He found an old dress of hers a couple of days ago; a silky gold affair crumpled up at the end of his bed, and it smells of her perfume and sweat. It's only when he's holding it that he can drift off into an uneasy sleep.
“Why don't you call her father?” Nathan suggests.
In that moment, it sounds like the best idea ever.
*
“Peter.” Noah greets him stiffly when he calls.
Something wells up in Peter's chest, clawing madly to be let out. He holds the phone tight to his ear. “Hi, hey,” he answers breathlessly. “I was just, um, do you know where Claire is? She- there's something I need to talk to her about, it- it's kind of important.”
“Do you really think,” Noah replies coolly, “that I'm going to tell you?” His voice drops to a whisper, but Peter can hear every word. “She told you to leave her alone, and she told me everything. If you could die, I would kill you. You've abused my little girl, Peter; her trust, her innocence, your responsibility as her uncle. Leave her alone.”
The line goes dead, and Peter sits motionless, with only the dial tone for company.
*
He aches for her touch, and in the dead of night she gives it to him. Her hands glide across his chest, dig roughly into his shoulders and scratch, scratch, scratch all the way down to his hips. The wounds don't heal, and she leaves bloody hand prints on his chest as she leans in to kiss him, biting down hard on his tongue when he explores her mouth.
“I can hurt you, Peter,” she growls, rocking her hips against his. “Beg me to hurt you.”
“Hurt me, Claire, please,” he says, reaching up to take hold of her.
When he wakes, there's blood smeared across his chest and sheets, and a metallic after taste in his mouth but no marks at all.
*
A girlfriend is what he needs. A nice, tall, dark-haired, large-breasted older woman to screw his brains out.
There are a lot of those in New York.
The woman he finds is a friend of his mother's, he's known her since he was five years old, called her 'auntie' for twenty-two years. He fucks her up against the dresser in the pantry.
Well, why the hell not? It's hardly the worst thing he's ever done.
When he's finished - a sweaty shaking mess, and yet not in any way satisfied - she reaches for her cigarettes. “Well, well, well,” she says, lighting up. “I always did think there was more to you than puppy dog eyes and floppy hair. You could give your brother a run for his money.”
She strokes her fingers along his jaw, sharp acrylic nails catching against the two day stubble there. He shoves her hand away. “Don't fucking touch me,” he hisses, bending down to retrieve his pants.
She shrugs. “Smoke?” she asks, holding the packet out to him.
“Those things'll kill you,” he says, taking one. Her laugh sounds like nails on a blackboard.
He takes a long drag, holding the smoke in his lungs until his eyes water. She laughs again, and it feels like it's gnawing at the back of his head. He stubs the cigarette out on his arm, holding it there until her eyes grow wide, savouring the pain.
There's something like fear in her expression when he asks for the lighter, her gaze glued to his smooth unblemished skin. He laughs at her, snatching the gold case from her hand.
*
He begins his experiments with pain and death six months to the day that she leaves. At first he flicks the lighter on, holds his hand above it long after the smell of burning flesh fills his nostrils, until he can't feel the pain any more.
He tries cutting his wrists, but the pain is so fleeting, and he always ends up having to wash up afterwards.
He tries hanging, but that involves prep work, and it's awkward getting down when he comes round. And anyway, he loses consciousness far too quickly.
Drowning: not painful, just kind of disconcerting.
Throwing himself off tall buildings: often mistaken for suicide, irritating to find deserted places to do it, pain too fleeting (again).
Overdose: hell to find enough pills to knock him out, gross to clean up the vomit, not painful at all.
He resorts to the internet for other ideas, and finds one he hadn't thought of: electrocution.
*
“Elle.” He surprises her outside of the facility in the middle of the day, under the cover of his invisibility. She jumps, blue balls of flaring up in her palms. “Wanna play?”
He takes them to a field. She squirms the whole time that he flies with her, not a thing like Claire, who might have been a bird she was so comfortable flying in his arms.
“Try your worst,” he says, setting her down.
“I don't understand,” she replies, sparks playing along her fingers nevertheless.
“You don't need to.” He steps back and holds his arms at his side. “C'mon, Elle, you said I'd like it.”
She shrugs a shoulder, stretching her arms out. “Okay.” And sends volts and volts of electricity square into his chest. He stumbles, throwing his head back as the electricity feels like it's rattling around his body, licking up and down his bones, exploding behind his eyelids.
“More,” he growls, and she hits him so hard that he blacks out for a second. When he comes around, she's looking down at him curiously, and for a second he thinks... “Claire?”
Elle's laugh sounds like breaking glass.
*
“Why don't we have sex?” Elle asks him once, smiling brightly on the roof of the Deveaux building. “I don't have to always hurt you, Peter, I can make you feel good too.”
“Does that feel good?”
Claire shivers beneath him as he sucks on her neck, as the water rushes to the shore and back out again, as the sun beats down the empty beach. This is the place that she used to come with West, her replacement-Peter, and they're here because there shouldn't be any place that she associates with that boy over him.
Peter has to leave his mark on her somehow.
He stretches over and begins exploring the shell of her ear; kissing, licking, biting, and she wreathes under him again.
“Peter,” she whispers. “Can we really do this?”
He moves around to her mouth, kisses her softly but insistently, until all her thoughts revolve around his lips and his hands.
“We can do anything,” he says, hugging her body to his. “Anything at all.”
Elle wilts under his hard stare. He holds his arm out.
“Just do it, Elle.”
*
They want him to save the world. Again.
Peter watches holding facility after holding facility fall, windows smashed, walls vaporised, guards with ripped out throats, and the cockroaches held within burst out on to the surface, their broken bloody trails easy to follow.
“Help,” Hiro says, because they wanted the same things an age ago. To save the world.
Peter almost says no.
*
His mother's friend - Sue - has a cigarette every time after they have sex, takes a couple of puffs, stubs it out and starts over again.
She has a new lighter, silver with her husband's initials on it.
“Do you love him?” Peter asks, because there are so many things that he doesn't understand, and he has no concept of why a person would commit adultery.
“I suppose.” The flame burns a sickly yellow for her third cigarette, and Peter reaches out, closing his fist around it, watching her closely.
“Why do you do this then?” he says. He wants her to explain it to him.
“You're young, you're pretty, you're here.” She ignores his smouldering skin, just like she ignores her husband's secret phone calls and badly concealed bank statements. “He's old and fat, and often away on business.”
“I'd never cheat on someone I loved.” It's not cheating, he tells himself. It's not, it's not, it's not.
She giggles, in a way she probably thinks is attractive. It isn't. “Oh Peter, so young. When you grow up, you'll learn.”
Her breasts are like two hard balls attached to her chest. He doesn't want to touch them. “I'm never going to grow up. I'm Peter Pan.”
She leans in, bringing them closer. He can't tear his gaze away. “Does that make me Wendy?”
He smirks. “No.”
If he cared, he'd feel guilty about the hurt expression colouring her features. She pulls the sheet up around her chest, releasing him from her hold. “Don't forget to turn the hallway light off when you leave.”
*
And then the first round of dying begins. Elle is killed by a stray bullet when she's out on a job (where's he going to find a charge big enough now?), Sue 'accidentally' takes too many sleeping pills (who's he going to forget himself with now?) and his mom is diagnosed with bone cancer (shouldn't he be more upset than this?).
He looks after her in her final days; he was a hospice nurse once, it's expected of him. He feeds her and washes her and manages her medication, and everyday he feels a little less than he did the day before.
“Beloved.” Her voice is barely a rasp now, and he turns to her as he changes her drip. "Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.”
“What?” He lays the drip down on the bed, and leans over her. “What did you say?”
“False prophets, Peter,” she whispers, eyes darting to the drip. “More morphine.”
She slips away peacefully that night. In her will, she leaves her house, her books, her paintings to Nathan and her whole fortune to Peter. You'll need it, the lawyer reads back to them.
Nathan pretends he isn't jealous, and doesn't point out that the doctors had said that Angela still had a good few weeks left.
*
When Nathan gets sick, he's seventy-five; which makes Peter sixty-five, he thinks. He still doesn't look a day over twenty-six.
It's a problem with his nervous system, they say, but experts are left scratching their heads over what to do, and Nathan refuses to stay in hospital.
“I'm not dying in this miserable fucking place,” he says, gritting his teeth as he pulls the IV out.
“You don't have to die at all,” Peter replies, standing like a loose end in the doorway. “My blood...”
Nathan looks up sharply. “Because you're so happy, Pete? What you've got in your veins is a curse and I don't want it. I've had a good run, and that's enough for me.”
The illness works its dark magic quickly, leaving Nathan bedridden, and a carer is brought in to look after him while Peter goes out and gets drunk.
He leaves a slurred message on the answering machine of the number that he thinks is the Bennets. Nathan's dying. Come see him. He might have said something else, cried or begged or yelled, but by morning he's blocked it all out.
*
It's his birthday and there's snow falling all around him as he stumbles out of one bar and into another. To celebrate turning sixty-six (?) he wastes a good chunk of his inheritance on alcohol of every kind and drinks it alone because anyone he could have once called a friend is probably wrapping Christmas presents for their grandkids right now.
He's staying at the mansion over the holidays, to spend a final Christmas with Nathan, and where once she used to be his ally against the dysfunction, now all Heidi has left for him is fear, watching a man trapped in time die agonisingly slowly.
The place is silent at four o'clock on the morning of Christmas Eve when he arrives home, the enormous tree glittering in the light of the street lamps. He falls over his great-niece and nephews toys, cursing and kicking them out of the way, and there's a creak from above - just a tiny noise, but he's had the misfortune to pick up enhanced hearing from one of his many encounters with Sylar.
And there she is at the top of the stairs, blonde hair like a halo around her head.
“Claire,” he croaks, leaning against the wall.
She doesn't look at him as she comes down, keeps her gaze on the ground, and tries to pass him. “I just came to say goodbye,” she whispers, but he grabs at her, clinging to her shoulders.
“Claire,” he says roughly, shaking hands closing around her face. “You're here, it's really you.”
She shies away from his touch. “I'm not here for you, it's been over thirty years, Peter. Move on.”
She attempts to get to the front door, but he drops to his knees, grabbing hold of her legs. “Please, Claire. Don't leave me here alone.”
Her lip curls. “Oh God, get away from me, Peter.”
And then she's gone, and he's curled up on the floor, waiting. Waiting for something else to happen.
When he wakes up, Heidi looks down at him with the same expression as Claire wore the night before, pity and disgust, and tells him that Nathan died in the night.
*
Move on, Claire said. It's been over thirty years. So he tries - everyone's gone now anyway, it's the perfect time to start over. Monty and Simon's kids have kids of their own now, and Peter's just a spectre of some other time in history of the Petrelli family.
He tries several things; being a self-styled superhero only to discover that the real world is nothing like the world within the colourful pages of a comic; going back to nursing, only to realise that he no longer cares about the plight of the dying, now he's just jealous and irritated by their families' tears; being a husband and father, only to see them as second best to everything he's ever had.
His wife is soft and pretty, easy to lie to and manipulate - her mind is easy to twist and change and rebuild to his liking, but he can never make her who he wants her to be. His kids are difficult and loud, saddled with powers that manifest when they're toddlers - the ability to control fire and the ability to fly, and he hates clearing up their messes, wiping teachers minds when the youngest has a tantrum and hovers a couple of inches off the ground, planting false memories when the oldest accidentally sets fire to her classroom and kills three of her friends.
He hates the responsibility and the commitment of... this, and then. And then their mom dies, in a car accident or something, and now he can't leave them, because what the hell will happen to them in a children's home? Probably bring about the next fucking apocalypse. Which he'd have to deal with.
“Dad?” his daughter says when she's eight, as her brother runs riot somewhere else in the house.
“What did you do?”
She points out of the window, where smoke pours from the windows of the neighbour's house.
He sighs. “We're moving.”
*
He did an okay job, he thinks, considering. They didn't turn into psychopaths or mass murders or anything, and when they're twenty-eight and thirty, he leaves them to deal with their dramas on their own.
That was years ago, maybe fifty or more and he decides that he's not going to make that mistake again; instead choosing to spend his time in brothels where no one knows his name or that he was important once upon a time.
That works out for him for a while - a good while, until the world needs saving again.
Reports come in, slowly in the first few months, the last story before kittens are rescued from trees by smiling firefighters - doctors talking about the rise and patterns of the disease. Nothing to worry about, it's not like it's going to happen to you, they all think. And anyway, it's only affecting the old, right? The theory of evolution in action.
Yeah, until kids and babies begin contracting it, and everyone in one tiny town in Kansas fall ill.
It's a central nervous system condition, the doctors say. They think it might be connected to fish, or something in the water, or radiation from cell phones, or or or-
They don't know, is the truth, but he does. He almost smiles at the audacity of it, Adam's back and he's not even trying any more. The same scheme as over a hundred years ago? It's unimaginative work.
*
Peter's blood isn't special, it turns out. As soon as it leaves his body, it's just regular old O negative, which was great when he wanted to save all those car crash victims with his awesome compatible blood, but that's not going to cut it any more.
Nathan might have been patient zero, he realises, with his nervous system problem that couldn't be explained. Something itches at the edge of his mind, poking insistently at the soft tissue - he couldn't save his brother, and all he's done with his life so far is cover up deaths and abuse people.
He needs to find Claire.
*
He needed to find Claire. After Nathan's death and resurrection, he'd been consumed with a burning desire to see her, and he'd flown to California, found her in a half empty house and kissed her before she could stop him.
She didn't even try to.
Love was an emotion that at twenty-eight Peter thought he was well-versed in; he'd been in and out of it his whole life, falling for a smile or joke or the way a girl's hair swished behind her when she walked away from him. Legs, eyes, hands, kissing, sex - he loved it all, found all girls to be completely mesmerising in one way or another.
But that was the thing: 'girls' plural. No one person could ever hold his attention, or put up with the intensity of his worship for long. He was too... obsessive, as a college girlfriend once explained kindly, stroking his hair and petting him like a dog.
Claire could be the object of his obsession, he'd been certain of that. She lapped the attention up, adored driving him wild with desire until he was thisclose to breaking apart, then piecing him back together, almost the same but with one or two bits missing. Oh well, who would notice?
She literally and figuratively changed him.
They made plans; he constructed stories about what they'd do when they were free from the stranglehold of blood and family. They'd travel, get married, change their names, have children, live their lives over and over, a different name with every turn of the century but the same Peter and Claire underneath.
He swore he'd never change from the man she'd created, that his personality was a permanent fixture, would weather every storm the world had to offer. He'd been so young.
She made him this way, and then she abandoned him, still only half-formed, to his fate. It wasn't fair, you can't slack off when you create a person anew, can't leave a child in the world alone.
He has to find her, because her work isn't finished yet.
*
He rediscovers her through books and newspapers and pictures; children miraculously going into remission, and men pulled from burning buildings.
She did travel, it seems, judging by the path she leaves behind her. A painting hangs in the Louvre of a girl with long long blonde hair, reaching all the way to the backs of her knees, her arms outstretched as she stands on the edge of a precipice. She could be any girl, he knows, might be a figment of the artist's imagination, but she isn't. She's Claire because his heart sings when he stands before it, she's Claire because who else could inspire such a passionate rendering?
In Italy, there's a novel that's already a classic, written eighty years previous, about a girl on the edges of life, a melancholy angel who you'll only ever see out of the corner of your eye, with a sad smile and delicate hands.
In England there's an old man that'll tell you the most fantastic tales, of travelling the world with a girl no older than sixteen, who rewrote everything he ever thought he knew about life at age forty-five.
In the outback of Australia, there's a town whose children grow up believing in the myth of vampires, ghosts and witches because of an ageless woman seen every few decades, who breaks her bones and cuts her wrists but always walks away unscathed.
But it's as if they're in different orbits, because wherever Peter is, Claire is not.
He follows her around the world twice and back to America, as governments fall and are replaced, and the earth goes round the sun thirty thousand times. Another hundred years pass and the trail is cold, while people get sicker and sicker, and no matter how many cures are discovered, the virus mutates to claim millions of new victims every year.
It's almost a companion now, the only thing in life that he can rely on to change and grow with him, to push him on in his seemingly unending quest.
It occurs to him more than once that maybe he's the virus; the thing that just doesn't know when to give up. He's a virus created just for Claire. Fitting, since she infected him first.
*
At some point - time has lost all meaning to him now - he finds himself in Texas, a crumpled photograph of Claire beneath his fingers, in a bar, showing it to the bartender.
“How old is this?” the guy says, setting Peter's glass down and carefully handled the washed-out picture. “It must ancient.”
Peter smirks, taking a long drink of the synthetic alcohol - hops and grapes don't grow so well any more. “Recognise her?”
The bartender frowns, thinks how much has this guy already had to drink? But he looks back down anyway, and his eyebrows slowly climb. “You know, she does kind of look like old Tom's grandkid.” He gestures over to a tiny old man hunched over in chair nursing a drink. “Maybe ask him?”
That was not the answer Peter expected. He takes the photograph back wordlessly, and walks over to Tom carefully, as if reality might shift away from him if he makes any sudden movements.
“Tom?”
The man squints up at him. “Yes?” he croaks.
“Do you- do you recognise this girl?” His fingers tremble as he holds the picture out. Tom squints harder, pulling a pair of glasses from where they hang in the collar of his shirt and slipping them on. He takes the photograph from Peter.
“Young man, where did you get this?”
Peter smiles at the obvious mistake in the statement. “Old family album, Sir.”
“Son,” Tom says, wrinkling his nose in a oddly familiar way, “this is my great-grandmother. Exactly what album did you get it from?”
*
His great-great-great-nephew. That's just weird. (And means that... Claire did move on from him.) Tom potters around his tiny house, pulling out stacks of albums and setting them down in front of Peter as he sits on a musty old couch.
“My great-grandfather Robert met her right here in Midland,” Tom says. “He was a builder and she blew through town and stole his heart. They're had two children: Sandra and Nathan, and then she left, abandoned her babies, and took his heart with her.”
Peter can sympathise with Robert, poring over the faded shots of Claire and her children, seeing something he relates to in her eyes - wanderlust, bitterness, loneliness, age.
“Can you do anything?” Peter asks tentatively.
Tom cocks his head. “You're being a little vague there.”
“Anything... that others can't.”
“I cook a mean chicken stew.” Tom smiles, showing all his shiny white dentures. “But maybe you mean this?” He holds his hand out, palm up, and produces a small flame. Peter copies him, unable to stop himself from making his flame larger and brighter.
“You get that from your great-great-grandmother,” he tells Tom.
“And how would you know that?”
He shrugs, retrieving his one picture and standing. “I should go, thanks for talking to me, Tom.”
The old younger man nods and follows him to the door. “I hope you find her.”
Peter frowns, and Tom smiles wider, crossing his arms. “I've always thought there was something strange about this family - Peter, is it?”
“You have no idea.”
*
Wars come and go, the world destroys and rebuilds itself under his feet and the pages of history never remember Peter Petrelli, an entirely unremarkable man.
Claire stays with him in his dreams, kisses him, whispers to him on cold nights, and his body responds even when his mind doesn't want to. He hates her, hates himself, hates the world.
The virus moves faster every year, felling families, politicians, schoolteachers, doctors; the high and the low - and Peter hasn't done a thing to stop it. Hasn't done a thing, and doesn't care to. He's not a hero, he's barely even a man - no name, no family, no social security number. If a person is a sum of their parts, then what does that make him?
There's a nuclear war once, that burns the ground and wipes out half of the population, destroys the new government and most technology. It's like going back to the beginning, to a time that even Peter doesn't know. No phones, television, computers, electric ovens, central heating; food difficult to come by, and mostly poisoned anyway - civilisation just gone with the push of a button.
He watches this from above, sometimes literally, as the rain starts but never stops, and people call out for help.
He says no.
*
And then it all changes so fast.
Nothing is Peter's life has been fast for a good long time now; he sees the patterns of mankind laid out before him, mistakes made over and over, and it's never hard to call the next great conflict, but this knocks him off his feet.
There are whispers these days, of gods among men, who heal and judge and save the worthy ones from the radiation sickness. It stirs something in Peter, makes him follow the pilgrimage to Kentucky, where camps have been erected and villages are being built - it's the most civilisation he's seen in years, everyone else is still scraping around in the dirt.
Gods, they say. Gods have bestowed this upon us.
*
The nights are cold enough to freeze his fingertips - they turn blue and black and pink in endless cycles, as rain beats down on his head and it's at these times that he hears the whispers from within the tents, as he prowls invisibly.
We must be inside by dark, or we will be punished. The night is for them, not us.
And it's now, right now, a moment that stands above the sludge of time, that he finds her.
She's walking across the sandy ground, letting her hands run through the covered fires of the worshippers. His brain stops, his heart pumps the first new blood for centuries around his body, time and space folds, and he's on her, hand over her mouth, taking them up up up into the sky.
*
“Peter,” she breathes, when they're seventy feet high, and her arms are draped around his shoulders. “You came.”
“I came?” he snarls, digging his fingers hard into her waist. “You left!”
“Mm,” is all she gives him, as the rain quickly soaks both of them through, glancing down and giggling. “The fires look fairy lights from up here.”
“Claire!” he yells, hugging her hard enough to crush her ribs. “Fucking look at me!”
She blinks up at his reddening face. “Don't yell, I'm right here,” she replies in a singsong voice, slipping her fingers underneath his waistband. “I guess you missed me, then?”
His arms tighten and spasm, and he wants to hit her but he drops her instead. She falls like a dead weight, doesn't scream or wave her arms or anything, just falls and impacts hard with the ground below. Peter swoops down and grabs her arm before she's managed to push it back into its socket, pulling her back up into the sky.
“What's going on, Claire?” he shouts as her arm twists unnaturally. She gives it smack with her hand - pop! - and she climbs up his body, her feet resting on top of his. “Tell me what's going on,” he repeats. “I don't understand.”
“Oh, poor little Peter,” she whispers, pressing her lips against his. He opens his mouth - to tell her to get off him, to tell her that he hates her and wishes she had died that night at homecoming - and finds himself kissing her, gripping her hair in his fists and moaning pathetically against her, repeating 'you left me, you left me' over and over.
He can't hold on to the righteous anger that he's been cultivating for hundreds of years - it melts straight out of him, leaving him the same shaking mess that he was when he was twenty-eight.
“I tried to find you, Claire,” he says, as she wipes at his wet cheeks. “I looked everywhere, I found your trail, but I could never find you.”
“I didn't want you to find me,” she replies, all smiles, eyes sparkling in a way that makes him feel just slightly off-kilter. “But I'll tell you a secret...” She pulls herself higher in his grip, leaning close to his ear. “I was pregnant when I left.”
The silence of the night screams all around him, and he stares at her grinning face. “Claire-”
“I had an abortion, of course, daddy arranged it. Boy, was that difficult, my body is like a fortress.”
“Claire...” His voice cracks, and he feels new tears roll down his cheeks.
“Oh baby, don't cry, that's all done and dusted now.” She kisses his cheeks, her fingertips fluttering along his jaw.
“I- I-” he stammers, taking long gasping breaths. “I needed you to- the virus, your blood could have cured it and I think- Nathan was the first to get it and and I didn't help him and he died and everyone died, and everyone's dead and I'm alone- I've been alone for so long-”
She shushes him with a finger to his lips. “You're not alone any more, Peter. Claire will look after you, and everything's going to be perfect now. And anyway, those people deserved to die.”
“What?” He wraps his hand around hers and holds it to his chest.
She shrugs. “Those people, they got the virus because they deserved to die; even Nathan, he wasn't y'know, the best guy ever, now was he? Maybe if he'd made more of an effort - who knows.”
“Claire.” He stares at her in shock. “Adam let that virus out.”
“I know, it was his judgement.”
Something drops in the pit of his stomach, something that should have long ago connected connects. False prophets.
“Adam isn't God, Claire, he can't choose who lives and who dies.”
“Why not?” She traces lines along his arms, staring, unfocused, into the distance. “He's seen everything, he understands human nature, knows man better than man knows himself. He's a god to all these people, and so am I.” She gives a sharp little nod, and wrinkles her nose, smiling up at him in a way that would normally be adorable.
“You aren't a god, Claire. You're supposed help people, not judge them.”
“I help. I raised a baby from the dead today, her mother gave me all her food for a week in thanks. I have to power to resurrect, I control life and death - in their eyes I am a god.”
“What happened to you?” he whispers, but she doesn't catch it, just looks at him with those scary shining eyes and continues.
“But, of course, we've just been waiting for the saviour, and now you're here. There's nothing you can't do - you're God now.” They've floated higher and higher as they've been speaking, and now she glances down again, spotting the one building for miles. “Oh, look, there's Adam,” she says, pointing to the roof. “Let's go tell him.”
“Yes,” he growls. “Let's.”
*
They touch down on the smooth surface of the building - it was probably rough concrete once, but hundreds of years of weather as smoothed it down to a marble-like shine.
Adam waits for them to cross over to him, his hands in his pockets and a smile on his face. The wind and the rain whistles viciously between them, making the ends of his coat billow up, and Claire's hair blow all over her face.
“The wanderer returns,” Adam exclaims. “I'm so glad, Claire has been a terrible bore going on and on about 'her hero' for centuries now. You don't know what it's like spending eternity with a teenager.” He rolls his eyes pointedly at Claire as she shrieks childishly and tries to untangle her hair.
Peter takes one, two, three steps and then he's nose to nose with Adam. “You,” he says, feeling his fists grow hot. “You are a mass fucking murderer.”
Adam smirks. “I suppose I am.”
“But here's the thing-” The wind howls louder, blotting out Claire's oblivious chatter and spinning around Peter and Adam like the eye of a tornado. “I can do anything. I can twist your mind, wipe your memories, remove your head from your shoulders - and then we'll see just how far you can regenerate.” He places a hand on Adam's chest, whispers, “I'm here now, Adam,” and pushes him off the edge of the building.
Adam laughs as he falls.
“Claire.” He steps back over to her, raindrops like needles on his skin, pulling her hair away from her face and holding her still. “I'm going to fix you, okay?”
She shrugs, smiles, pushes herself on to her toes and kisses his forehead. “Whatever you say, Peter.”